A Recommendation

If, like me, you’re excitedly preparing for Jolabokaflod, and you’ve got some SF/F fans on your gift list, you might want to consider the following:

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller.

This book manages to be lyrical and sweet, while simultaneously being set in a harrowing post-apocalyptic world. It’s told in the first person from the perspective of a brain damaged survivor of an extinction-level plague, and explores the deep weirdness of male friendship, and the depths of both human kindness and human depravity. I’d put this one in the same general space as Station Eleven, but with a lot more adrenaline.

Dying of the Light, by George R. R. Martin.

This book long predates A Song of Ice and Fire, and it may be a little difficult to dig up, but it’s well worth the effort. It’s set in a distant future where humans have expanded into the stars and then partially collapsed, with the result that humans from different planets are nearly aliens to one another. The action takes place among the last inhabitants of an abandoned festival planet, just before it spins off into the abyss. The tone is wistful, the plot is intricate, and the characters are fully formed and unforgettable. 

A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge.

Every great writer has something he or she does better than anyone else. For Vinge, it’s imagining alien species that are different from us in every conceivable way, figuring out how those differences would affect the way they act and think, and then turning them into fully realized and sympathetic characters. In this book, he does it with giant, tunnel-dwelling spiders on a planet orbiting a variable star. I read this during a sixty inch blizzard years ago, and the idea of the atmosphere precipitating out as snow didn’t seem that crazy to me at the time. Highly recommended.